Our Icon ✨

Since we started the Crown of Mary, I’ve had a deep desire to have an icon created to be a centre point and focus for our gatherings. It was also something that I wanted to bring with us now that we’ve officially started leading pilgrimages to holy sites.

It was really important to me to find an artist who could create this for us, and I wanted the image of Mary to reflect not only my personal spirituality, but the spirituality that we are developing together in the Crown of Mary.

Lourdes has been so pivotal to my own calling to share the light of Mary with the world, and there’s one particular image of the crowned Mother there that has always struck me. She’s surrounded by the rose garden, where pilgrims can leave a rose as an offering to Our Lady.

So when we were planning our pilgrimage to Lourdes, I had a line drawing created based on that particular image. We used it throughout the pilgrimage on our T-shirts, journals and bags, and we also had a special run of medals created for our pilgrims.

I then sent that image over to UK-based Ukrainian iconographer Petro Birov at Icon Experience and invited him to create a traditional-style icon based on the crowned Mother — one that we could have blessed and bring with us on our retreats and pilgrimages, but also one that would inspire us to continually turn towards Mary as our Divine Mother.

Petro created the icon using traditional icon-painting techniques, including egg tempera and 23.5-karat gold leaf.

And I’m excited to say that we’ve also collaborated with Petro to create a special run of replicas of our icon, which will be coming very soon.

But for now, here’s some behind-the-scenes of how our icon was created.